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Audacity of Truth
"Change" You Can Believe In:
"Nixon didn’t try to do that. They couldn't control (the media). They didn’t try. [...] What the hell do they think we are, puppets?"
- Liberal opinion writer Helen Thomas, describing the Obama admin's penchant for heavily scripting public appearances & press conferences - 7/1/09
Evading the call for censure
Looks like about all Sen. Russ ‘let’s censure President Bush’ Feingold is hearing these days from members of his own party in response to his censure call are the sounds of crickets chirping:
Democratic senators, filing in for their weekly caucus lunch yesterday, looked as if they’d seen a ghost.
“I haven’t read it,” demurred Barack Obama (Ill.).
“I just don’t have enough information,” protested Ben Nelson (Neb.). “I really can’t right now,” John Kerry (Mass.) said as he hurried past a knot of reporters — an excuse that fell apart when Kerry was forced into an awkward wait as Capitol Police stopped an aide at the magnetometer.
Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) brushed past the press pack, shaking her head and waving her hand over her shoulder. When an errant food cart blocked her entrance to the meeting room, she tried to hide from reporters behind the 4-foot-11 Barbara Mikulski (Md.).
“Ask her after lunch,” offered Clinton’s spokesman, Philippe Reines. But Clinton, with most of her colleagues, fled the lunch out a back door as if escaping a fire.
In a sense, they were. The cause of so much evasion was S. Res. 398, the resolution proposed Monday by Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) calling for the censure of President Bush for his warrantless wiretapping program. At a time when Democrats had Bush on the ropes over Iraq, the budget and port security, Feingold single-handedly turned the debate back to an issue where Bush has the advantage — and drove another wedge through his party.
So nonplused were Democrats that even Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), known for his near-daily news conferences, made history by declaring, “I’m not going to comment.” Would he have a comment later? “I dunno,” the suddenly shy senator said.
Republicans were grateful for the gift. The office of Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.) put a new “daily feature” on its Web site monitoring the censure resolution: “Democrat co-sponsors of Feingold Resolution: 0.”
Heheh.
Senator Frist tried to call the Senate Dems’ bluff this week on this, but they’re running away from it at lightening speeds. I think what Feingold is doing here is playing to his constituency – not to mention putting out feelers to see what kind of support he’d get from the base should he decide to run for President in ‘08. I don’t think he even expects to get any real measure of support in the Senate … but posturing before the cameras with the ‘bold’ idea to censure the President will no doubt play well back home – and future potential Democratic primary voters.
Nevertheless, it is quite amusing to see Senate Democrats backing away from this as if he were presenting them with a bowl of hot lava. The last couple of weeks have seen the Dems make inroads on the national security front (based on faulty pretenses of course) and they don’t want to be seen as unjustly attacking the President over a program (the NSA surveillance ’scandal’) with which the American people have made clear they don’t have an issue. But this IS playing well to the base, so Feingold’s stunt is paying off.
Then again, Howard Dean played well to the base, too.
Expose the Left has video of Sen. Feingold doing a bit of evading of his own – that is, evading a debate with Sen. Arlen Specter on the issue of censuring the President. Transcript:
SEN. ARLEN SPECTER: Mr. President might I ask the Senator from Wisconsin to stay on the floor?
SPECTER: Mr. President
MR. PRESIDENT: Senator from Pennsylvania
SPECTER: Mr. President, well I think this subject matter is worthy of debate, but not withstanding my experience at debating, I don’t think I could debate without someone to debate with. So I tried to attract the attention of the Senator from Wisconsin before he departed the chamber. I think you got him right as he was on the way out the door, but let me ask his staffers if they would like to invite the Senator from Wisconsin to return to the floor with my having listened to his long soliloquy, if I might have the benefit of his presence so that we can deal with these issues in some substantive detail.
Others blogging about this: Captain Ed, Flopping Aces, Gina Cobb, Gary Gross at California Conservative, Joe Gandelman, Tom Maguire, Say Anything
AM Update 10:03 AM ET: Looks like this is about as close as Specter got to debating Feingold yesterday (direct link to photo) 
PM Update 2:16 PM ET: The Wall Street Journal nails Feingold’s – and the rest of the Congressional Democrats – real agenda:
But as a political matter, the Wisconsin Senator knows exactly what he’s doing. He knows that anti-Bush pathology runs so deep among many Democrats that they really do think they’re living in some new dictatorship. Liberal journals solemnly debate impeachment, and political-action groups have formed to promote it. One of our leading left-wing newspapers recently compared Mr. Bush to J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, as if there were even a speck of evidence that this White House is wiretapping its political enemies.
When the fever gets this hot in supposedly mainstream forums, Mr. Feingold is right to conclude that the facts behind any censure or impeachment motion won’t really matter. All that will count is the politics, which means it will come down to a question of votes in Congress. And several leading Democrats have already raised the “impeachment” card.
California Senator Barbara Boxer loudly wrote four legal scholars late last year asking if the NSA wiretaps were impeachable. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, has introduced a resolution calling for the creation of a “select committee to investigate the administration’s intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment.”
In other words, everything that Mr. Bush has been accused of during the last five years, no matter how Orwellian or thoroughly refuted, will be trotted out again and used as impeachment fodder. And lest you think this could never happen, Judiciary is the House committee through which any formal impeachment resolution would be introduced and proceed. As the country heads toward 2008 and a Democratic nomination fight, John Kerry and Hillary Rodham Clinton would be hard-pressed to avoid going along with Mr. Feingold, Al Gore, and others feeding the bile of the censure/impeach brigades.
Which brings us back to Mr. Feingold’s public service in floating his “censure” gambit now. He’s doing voters a favor by telling them before November’s election just how Democrats intend to treat a wartime President if they take power.Not only do they want to block his policies, they also plan to rebuke and embarrass him in front of the world and America’s enemies. And they want to do so not because there is a smidgen of evidence that he’s abused his office or lied under oath, but because they think he’s been too energetic in using his powers to defend America. By all means, let’s have this impeachment debate before the election, so voters can know what’s really at stake.
Read the whole thing.
Related Toldjah So posts:
- It doesn’t get any better than Jeff Goldstein (re: Feingold’s stunt)
- Senator Russ Feingold calls for censure of Bush
- House approves Patriot Act, Senate panel rejects broad NSA inquiry
- NSA Surveillance Program ’scandal’ – update
- Congressional probe of NSA surveillance may not happen afterall
- Admin briefs Congress on NSA surveillance
- Thomas Sowell on the NSA ’scandal’ controversy
- NSA ’scandal’ fallout: convicted terrorist conspirators wanting cases thrown out
- Intelligence officials: NSA leak has undermined ability to fight terrorism
- On politicizing the Patriot Act and the NSA ’scandal’
- NYT: NSA scandal is worse than WWII Japanese internment camps
- Link between disposable phone sale surge and NSA leak?
- Whistleblower or leaker?
- Joe Klein: How to Stay Out of Power (and undermine the war in the process)
- Why it was important to keep the cat in the bag
- The Rep. Jane Harman flip flop
- NSA initially acted on its own after 9-11
- Investigations begin into the NSA eavesdropping leak
- “… the only thing outrageous about this policy is the outrage itself”
- Michael Barone on the MSM’s ‘eavesdropping’ coverage
- Brief history of warrantless searches
- Past presidents and the NSA
- Bill Clinton and the NSA
- WSJ: “Thank you for wiretapping”
- The Prez fires back
- Prez essentially says ‘let me do my job’
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By the way, did I mention…
That was the CLINTON administration.
steve, if you take a couple more steps from the cave, you’ll notice that the rest of the monkeys are walking upright and have keys to things. Search for the keeeeeeeeeeys. Use the forccccccccce.
Doncha love the way Feingold played right into Rove’s hands? Bush has never been as popular as he is now – America positively LOVES the man. So insightful, so brave, and always holding the interests of Americans first.
Then here comes Feingold, meeping about “censure,” as if Bush had done something wrong! Puh-leeze… Why, a formal censure would get the press and the population talking about NSA and the WMD thing, deals for ports, next thing you know, Bush might actually become unpopular!
It’s good to know that we have real, true-blooded Americans who can stand up and defend the Constitution against whistleblowers and nit-pickers like Feingold. Oh this is soooo good! Pure gold!
You are all over the board. I can’t read you (too much trying to figure out which phrase is sarcasm).
But, I’ll leave you with this. The NSA’s actions authorized by the president has many constitutional scholars puzzled as to why the Democrats are claiming illegality. It’s nice to ACT like you are for the constitution and someone else isn’t but why not debate the substance. Do you recognize the FISA court itself in 2002 said that the President has the right to have warrantless surviellance of enemy communications? Does that weigh in to your thinking at all or do you dismiss it?
Right on Baklava.
Let’s investigate this thing and find out if its legal or not.
If not, we can allow GWB and ALL other Presidents to do so.
If not. no censure. Impeachment!!
Baklava: The NSA issue is exceedingly complex, and very difficult to summarize in comments.
The gist, however, is that warrantless wiretapping of communications (phone, e-mail) is permitted for 15 days following the outbreak of war. Thereafter, the NSA is obligated to seek warrants for specific acts of surveillance, with a 72-hour grace period in cases of extreme urgency.
What is suspected, and we may have confirmation of this from insider leaked reports, is that the NSA program is actually a resucitation of Poindexter’s TIA program, which essentially sifts all traffic with algorithms, effectively surveilling everybody.
We know that equipment installed at the backbone level of the communications infrastructure can achieve that task easily. But since the Bush administration is deploying this program without warrants, we have no official record of who is being monitored, and that, really, is the problem.
In the absence of warrants, there’s simply no way to verify Bush’s claim that he’s following the rules, or that the instances of surveillance in question always involve at least one overseas party or an al-qaeda suspect. But when Bush formally admitted that he has been circumventing FISA, well, then he admitted to breaking the law.
Censure should be the least of his worries.
Raven wrote with authority, “In the absence of warrants, there’s simply no way to verify Bush’s claim that he’s following the rules”
What are your credentials. Do you know it’s not just Bush making the claim? I at least recognize there is a debate although I fall on the side of those who recognize the commander in chief’s authority during the time of war to surveille enemy communications.
Censure would be the biggest gift to Republicans this election year.
In agreement with Baklava- Gold is exactly what it would be, Raven. The only down side of it is, like the other two dozen or so losses by the donks, it will go unheeded and mostly unreported. The upside, is that it seems to indicate that the moonbats are developing consistency, albeit a slow learning curve. But if you keep taking the jello in and out of the fridge, the fruits sink to the bottom.
I particularly enjoy the part of their movie where they eat their own. Pass the jello please, Mr. Feingold.
“…In the absence of warrants, there’s simply no way to verify Bush’s claim that he’s following the rules…”
Bbbbbbzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz – Wrong….
- Don’t you just love how so many of the moonbats never know what the others are doing. Don’t look now Sparky, but yesterday, *gasp*, some of your own Dimbulb Senators had just finished reviewing the entire program, and said its not only right, its “absolutely vital” to the WOT, openly praised the Presidents efforts, and said they were totally impressed.
- Evidently you amd other tinhats didn’t get the memo. Impeachment/censure? You guys must have a total political death wish, you’re so immersed in your hate vendetta against Bush/Rove. I don’t blame you really. They’ve beat your heads in like a drum in the past two elections. *snort*
- Bang’s fangs
Bang says, “- Don’t you just love how so many of the moonbats never know what the others are doing. Don’t look now Sparky, but yesterday, *gasp*, some of your own Dimbulb Senators had just finished reviewing the entire program, and said its not only right, its “absolutely vital” to the WOT, openly praised the Presidents efforts, and said they were totally impressed. “
So instead of actually READING and going through it, they just called for impeachment and censure, blasted the president in all media outlets, whipped up a bunch of fear-mongering of ‘bush is spying on your domestic phone call to your mother’.
Amazing.
Talk about putting the cart before the horse.
Lack of due diligence.
Negligence.
Broken record.
Since shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the National Security Agency has monitored the international communications of people inside the United States when their calls and e-mails are believed to be linked to al-Qaida.
The government normally has to get a court order to monitor domestic communications, but Bush signed an executive order directing the NSA to conduct the operations without a judge’s approval.
Believed to be. Normally has. Without a.
There’s only one appropriate answer to Raven’s comment.
“Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning, little relevancy bore.”